At the end of May I received a letter claiming to be from Lloyds, my bank, saying they believe I have recently updated my details and that I am now a tax resident of Egypt.
It says if this is true, I need to confirm it by sending them a passport, ID card or other documentation proving I am a resident of Egypt.
I received a follow-up letter a month later at the end of June telling me I still hadn’t signed it.
London or Luxor: Our reader received an email out of the blue from Lloyds Bank asking if they were a tax resident of Egypt (right), despite them living at the same address in Bromley (left) for the last 35 years
I am in my mid-seventies, am a British citizen, have lived in the UK for 74 years, including the same address in Bromley for the last 35 and have no links to Egypt. I am very worried about falling victim to a scam.
Is this letter legitimate, and do I have to fill it in? – M.V., via email
George Nixon, This is Money, replies: This is not the first time someone has written to us having received a letter like this.
In 2017 we were contacted by a reader who had received a letter from the same bank, Lloyds, and another from Halifax, asking them to confirm their tax information.
In that instance, the letter from Lloyds was legitimate, even if the customer was no longer with the bank.
This is part of something called the common reporting standard, introduced in 2017, designed to crack down on global tax evasion, by enabling countries to share tax information across borders.
The UK was one of the first countries to sign up to it along with the rest of the European Union, although Egypt has not yet done so.
The letter our reader received at the end of May, asking them to update their details as Lloyds believed they were now a tax resident of Egypt
The letter asked our reader to confirm this situation by sending a copy of an Egyptian passport, driving licence or ID card by post to a PO Box in Leeds
Under the rules, banks in this country must provide up-to-date tax information to HMRC about non-UK residents with financial accounts in the UK.
But while that means these letters are sent out, it doesn’t necessarily mean the one in your situation is legitimate.
After all, fraudsters are adept at impersonating banks, the taxman, the police or other companies, whether that is by email, over the phone or by post.
And of course, the Egypt element makes things even stranger.
You phoned up Lloyds and said you had not updated your details and were unhappy about the idea of sending a copy of your passport or driving licence in the post, especially if you were worried you had been contacted by con artists.
While they did tell you it was to do with HMRC, from the emails you sent us they didn’t appear to explain why you had been contacted, and why they thought you had lived in Egypt.
Although you told us you’d had a fortnight’s holiday in 1990 to visit the Pyramids at Giza and Luxor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, you haven’t been since and were very clear you’d never had any intention of living in the country. Nor did you have any family living there.
We contacted Lloyds, who told us the letter was a genuine one, as in the case of our reader in 2017, but this time it was sent by mistake.
Luxor, Egypt. We found out our reader had been contacted because someone at Lloyds had gotten their telephone number wrong and swapped the first two digits around. The area code for London is +020, the international dialling code for Egypt is +20
While you had not updated your details, someone at Lloyds Bank accidentally had.
The letter itself gives an indication of this where it says the bank believed you were a tax resident of Egypt ‘due to the following information we hold for you: telephone number’.
The area code for Bromley, where you live, and the rest of London is +020. The international dialling code for Egypt, is +20.
Someone had clearly accidentally made a mistake somewhere and got the first two digits of your telephone number the wrong way around, which explains why the letter was sent.
A Lloyds Bank spokesperson said: ‘All financial institutions that operate in common reporting standards participating countries are required to gather specific customer information and report it to HMRC or the relevant tax authorities and we may write to customers who need to confirm this information.
‘We have apologised to the customer for the error in the classification of their details which resulted in her receiving the letter incorrectly and their data has now been updated.’
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